Christian Horner is worth his weight to Red Bull

Although its always fun to hobnob for a few minutes with one so famous off the Haunted Fishtank, I wasn't expecting much from my few minutes interviewing Red Bull team principal Christian Horner about his team's involvement with Infiniti.

Although its always fun to hobnob for a few minutes with one so famous off the Haunted Fishtank, I wasn't expecting much from my few minutes interviewing Red Bull team principal Christian Horner about his team's involvement with Infiniti.

It looked to me like a pretty transparent deal, and one aimed at people who are fundamentally naive: an inadequately-known car brand gives an F1 team lots of money in exchange for being embraced by its drivers and team members who are famous everywhere.

Result: lots more brand awareness. Great as far as it goes, but let's not pretend it's anything more than that.

Horner, a quietly polite man who meets everyone on the same terms, confounded me. My companion in the interview asked some pretty predictable will-you-win-on-Sunday questions, and though Horner must already have answered these a million times, he dealt with them patiently and interestingly.

He also dealt easily with my rather cynical view of the reason for us presence on the Infiniti stand - the pursuit of money - by calmly making it clear that the Infiniti deal actually involved proper technical aid on KERS battery technology from Nissan technical people in Japan (which is saving weight and improving battery performance) and that several Nissan R&D types now work in the F1 base at Milton Keynes.

Found myself thinking that few team bosses would have been able or willing to carry themselves so well in such circumstances, and that Horner had showed another side of his importance to Red Bull. From such small building blocks, world championships are undoubtedly constructed.